Questionnaires and surveys - consultation

If you need to gather feedback from a large group of people, a questionnaire or survey can be a very effective and relatively simple way. If you need general feedback on a specific subject, or if you're considering changing the time or format of an activity/service on offer, this might be a good way of engaging with people who regularly use it. Questionnaires and surveys can also be anonymous, which allows a greater degree of honesty than some other methods.

Things to consider:

• Does your audience have particular language or literacy requirements?
• How many questions do you need to ask? More than 12 are likely to put people off.
• Will all of your audience have digital access? Can you provide paper copies?
• What questions are best to get the response you need? Think about closed versus open questions, and make sure you have a good balance between both types. Think about whether you want to invite comments as well.
• Are you going to offer incentives for respondents to participate?
• How are you going to share your survey with enough people to ensure a satisfactory response rate?
• How will you analyse the results? Think about this when writing it.
• Think about how you will give feedback on the results and what you will do as a result. The 'You said, we did tool' (With instructions | Without instructions) in this toolkit is a simple way of doing this and can be shared in a digital format or hard copies. You may also want to create charts or an infographic to represent what you learnt visually.

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